Well, if it makes anyone feel better: Egypt, you are not alone. Democracy means being the victim of your fellow citizens’ idiocy. Trust the Italian on this one.

While theoretically direct democracy (of which referenda are the best example) is the ultimate realization of political participation, in reality there are a lot of things that can go wrong. For one, you have black and white decisions to be made (yes or no – ya3ani is not an option). Referendum questions can be (and usually are) complicated. In a country where most people hardly ever set foot in a polling station of their own volition, it is safe to assume that the average voter is not well-versed in Egyptian Constitutional Law. Finally, politicians and media play a huge role in how public perception is shaped around the issues, up to the point that the actual crux of the referendum gets lost in political warfare.

Anyways, just to prove that direct democracy fails even in the most advanced (cough cough) democracies:

Despite the merit of the vote which I am in no place to comment on, there are two things that stands out: a 41% turnout and a 77% of people voting for yes.

The low turnout means that the majority is silent. More like, deaf and mute.

On the 77%, if any of you ever had the pleasure of taking a political economy class (sarcasm is my second language, did I mention that?) your lecturer would have bombarded with the notion of the median voter’s theorem. I will spare the long boring talk but basically it is a bit of an anomaly how skewed the results of this vote were in favour of ‘yes’. In Italian, we call elections with over 65 % of votes going in one direction as ‘Bulgarian Consensus’. Something just wasn’t free and fair. Not just the procedural aspects, but also how the referendum was communicated to voters. In most referenda I have voted for (and god, don’t we love wasting our tax money on direct democracy in Italy), the split is usually 50-50 or at best 40-60. So this is my shopping list of why I think the vote was so abnormal in its 77-percentedness:

The topic was very complex (constitutional amendments, last time I checked it was not bawab’s forte)

All the questions were lumped together so it was a packaged deal, take it or leave it. One might argue that constitutional reform ought to be a tad bit more nuanced. The fact that 77% of people agreed on all of those issues is a bit bizarre.

Article 2 on the religion and other attributes of the president (hardly Egypt’s most pressing priority at this stage, methinks) was thrown into the lot just for kicks or, if you are a cynical bastard like myself, to play off the secular vs the religious, the christians vs the muslims, the brazar muslimhood vs the salafi, my landlady vs. my bawab etc…

And finally, the referendum was organized in 3 weeks, against the backdrop of tanks in the street and media trying to cope with regional politics slowly imploding and various other shenanigans such as torture of civilians.

So in the end, my impression is that most people were too flustered to concentrate on the essence of the referendum question and interpreted this vote as a vote of confidence in the army. And with generations of Egyptians being raised loving stability even if it means they get screwed sideways from life, one might not be surprised of this Mubarak-like consensus.

But my final question is: does this vote really matter? If the army is committed to democratic transition the yes vote does not matter because in the end they are going to devolve powers to a civilian government and Egypt is going to be the land of milk and honey. If the army is not committed to democratic transition, even if a no vote had won, they would have done whatever it pleased them anyways.